Psicolapse
2017 · 8m · España
Directed by Arnau Gòdia
Genres: dark comedy, drama
Tones: contemplative, melancholic
Anna, a novice psychiatrist, receives a patient in a state of apathy caused by his work; the therapy is so exhausting that it ends with the patient recovered — and Anna falling into the same apathy.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
The symmetry is almost too neat—patient recovers, therapist breaks—but Gòdia sells the subversion by playing it straight, which is smarter than winking at the audience; the real trick is making apathy *contagious*, and that's genuinely unsettling.
A formally elegant inversion of the therapeutic narrative that echoes Bresson's interest in the exhaustion of care, structured with the precision of a theorem; the film understands itself as part of a lineage of work examining the toll of witnessing others' suffering.
The masterstroke is the sound design in the second half—how the world drains of texture as Anna's apathy takes hold—which does the emotional work that dialogue never could, transforming a concept into a *felt* experience on a minimal budget.